August 2017 Summaries

A non-technical manager can successfully oversee engineers by focusing on personal growth, building a very human relationship with their team members, trusting them to make decisions and manage their time effectively, and understanding that customer conversations are more about tone and empathy than technical ability. Trust is key in this relationship, and honesty about what you don't know is essential. With the right support network of senior technical teammates, non-technical managers can foster growth and career progression within their organization, ultimately benefiting both themselves and their customers. By adopting a people management approach that emphasizes interpersonal skills and time management, non-technical managers can thrive in overseeing their engineering teams.

The author has reviewed dozens of product design portfolios and is now sharing their insights on what makes a good portfolio. They argue that traditional approaches, such as Dribbble-style portfolios or overly detailed case studies, often fail to effectively communicate the value of a designer's work. Instead, they recommend presenting a list of links to products designed by the individual, along with short descriptions and screenshots, which can provide a more concise and effective way to showcase one's skills. This approach is particularly useful for designers who are busy or lack experience working on well-known products. The author suggests that even a plain text email with links can be an effective portfolio, as it allows designers to focus on the results of their work rather than the design process itself.

Intercom's blog writing team has established a set of guiding principles to inform their content, which they believe will help readers produce high-quality articles. The key points include speaking with authority, being themselves, clarity and concision, presenting ideas visually, focusing on quality over quantity, writing intriguing headings and headlines, paying attention to punctuation, and engaging with readers. By following these guidelines, writers can create content that resonates with their audience and achieves their goals. It's recommended that companies with multiple writers adopt a similar set of principles to ensure consistency in tone and style across all content.

At a fast-paced startup, attracting top talent requires attention to detail from the early stages of the recruiting process. A candidate's experience begins long before they meet with the company and continues until they sign their offer. Every impression made along the way matters, especially when multiple offers are on the table. To set a startup apart, consider personalizing job descriptions by including three essential sections: what the opportunity is, what the person will be doing, and what skills are required. Additionally, provide clear application status updates, communicate with candidates in a thoughtful and warm manner through email templates, and offer rejection communications that ask for feedback and show appreciation for their time invested in the process. By prioritizing candidate experience, startups can differentiate themselves from larger companies and increase their chances of attracting top tier talent.

We set out to help customers measure and understand the quality of their support, recognizing that feature requests can be iceberg-like in terms of developmental complexity. We designed a solution that focused on understanding the core issue - how teams perform in supporting customers - and developed conversation ratings as a key component. The ratings use emoji faces, which are expressive, modern, and aligned with Intercom's messenger style. The system allows users to add comments to their ratings, providing both positive and negative feedback, and has an engagement rate of over 50%. The feature also includes a heart that fills up when a user receives a positive rating, creating a pop of confetti and displaying feedback in a small card. This simple yet powerful tool provides valuable insights for teams to improve their support performance and brings joy to their daily work.

Building empathy in a product team is crucial for maintaining and evolving products in ways that won't negatively impact the user experience. Empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support are essential, but often not considered "real work". A good understanding of your customer and their problems is the responsibility of everyone who contributes to ideas about how a product will work. Without empathy, assumptions can be made which are weakened by lack of evidence and increase risk in decision-making. Companies like InVision, Airbnb, Facebook, Fitbit, and Riot Games promote empathy through design tools and experiences that allow team members to understand their customers' needs and behaviors. User research such as observing customer interactions provides the "Lasso of Truth" for product teams, crushing assumptions and reducing risk. Even without direct participation in research, opportunities can be created to build empathy by consuming customer insights, mapping the customer experience, perspective-taking, providing customer support, becoming a customer, exercising empathy, being curious, and always considering the customer's perspective. Building empathy is proactive and should be a continuous effort for product builders to stay up-to-date with their customers' evolving needs and experiences.

After a successful product launch, companies are not done yet; they must continue to listen, learn, iterate, and ship improvements based on real customer feedback. The launch is the start of a marketing journey that involves reaching, attracting, converting, and educating customers. However, product launches often generate record traffic but don't necessarily translate to increased conversions. Companies should aim to measure the success of their product marketing across every stage of the funnel and identify confusion or issues that might prevent people from buying the product. To do this, they need to listen to unfiltered feedback, make sense of it, and then ship continuous improvements. The process involves taking small, thoughtful steps throughout the life of the product, rather than focusing solely on the next launch date. By iterating on what's already out in the world, companies can ensure that their messaging, pricing, user experience, and more are always improving and effective.

A good product name gives that product a certain shape — for the team designing it, and for those who use it. To choose a memorable name for a product, start with the jobs you want people to associate it with. A name can help people create a mental model for your product, which helps them to remember and associate your product with a particular job. Other factors come into play, including how a name sounds, and how distinctive, appropriate, likable, extendable, and protectable it is. Choosing a name that describes the job creates borders for design within, setting subtle constraints for what's appropriate for the feature or features that evolve from those designs. The goal is to create an association that can be easily remembered, while defining what jobs you won't cover, which means deciding the direction of growth. A good product name should support human conversation, not replace it, and Operator was chosen as a name with this design opinion in mind.

The key points of the text revolve around the importance of onboarding users successfully, as it can make or break a company's marketing efforts. The author emphasizes that understanding where users are and where they want to go is crucial in creating an effective onboarding messaging campaign. Unlike fleeting product tours and modals, onboarding emails and in-app messages offer a more personal touch, allowing businesses to nurture long-term relationships with their customers. To help businesses achieve this, the author has created The Onboarding Starter Kit, which includes relatable advice, good messages to send, best practices, and a guide on measuring success. By using a combination of nudges, prompts, and persuasion, businesses can increase the chances of activating new signups, customizing their journey, and ensuring successful users.

Operator is a bot designed to augment human tasks in customer support, freeing humans to focus on more complex issues. It follows strict rules and machine learning to recognize when its input is helpful but not, ensuring it doesn't overwhelm users with repetitive or irrelevant information. Unlike many other bots, Operator prioritizes manners, providing clear routes, avoiding loops, and respecting user context. Its features include setting expectations, automatically answering user questions, measuring customer satisfaction, and growing through new skills over time. Operator aims to strike a balance between augmentation and automation, leveraging machine learning and manners to simplify tasks and remove repetition from workflows.

The key to crafting effective feature announcements is understanding the target audience, choosing the right messaging medium, and timing the announcement carefully. It's essential to identify who will benefit most from the feature, where they are likely to be engaged with it, what information they need to know, and when to reach them. The message itself should intrigue users enough to take action while also educating them on how the new feature solves a problem. A well-crafted announcement can encourage users to try out a new feature, re-engage inactive customers, and ultimately drive business value.

Tracy Chou, an engineer, tech lead, and diversity advocate, discusses her career in startup engineering, the importance of a liberal arts education, and how it can help build better, more inclusive products and teams. She shares her experiences working at Quora and Pinterest, where she encountered growing pains such as rapid scaling, lack of testing frameworks, and differences in organizational structure. Tracy emphasizes the value of being a generalist engineer, having experience in multiple teams, and developing technical empathy. She believes that engineers should consider the implications of their work on society and humanity, and that a well-rounded education can help bridge this gap. While she is cautiously optimistic about progress towards a more inclusive industry, she notes that it will take time and hard work to achieve true diversity and inclusion.

Sharing the power of data through storytelling and building strong partnerships is crucial for inspiring others to believe in its value. In product development, data can help make informed decisions at every stage, from setting up a problem to closing out a solution. Data focuses minds by establishing what you do know and what you don’t know, sparks creativity by bringing new information into the room, and encourages participation from the whole team. However, getting to this place requires understanding how and where decisions are being made and knowing the best way to share insights with your team. Strong partnerships take time, are nuanced, and personal, but they're essential for inspiring others to believe in data's power. Crafting a narrative with data is also crucial, as it can make or break the impact of analysis. By building strong relationships and telling compelling stories with data, teams can make better, more collaborative decisions that ultimately lead to better products.